Lost Echoes (16 page)

He sat there and hoped there were no sounds outside of the loud music, guy at the piano. Nothing hidden in anything he might bump. It was a new joint, so maybe it was safe.

Joey was not loopy, but the wine had made him happy, and something of a loudmouth. Or a louder mouth. He was talking about the waitress and how he’d like to give her an exploratory plumb, or some such thing, so Harry decided to go to the bathroom.

Tad and Joey watched Harry thread his way through a new batch of patrons, and Joey said, “You a queen, Tad?”

Tad turned to him, said, “Now say that again.”

“I said are you a queen? You got a thing going for Harry?”

“How do you like your steak?”

“I asked you a question. I didn’t mean anything by it, asking you if you was queer.”

Tad gently placed his menu on the table, shifted his position, and laid an arm across the back of the booth.

“All right. Let’s you and me get down to it,” Tad said.

“Suits me.”

“Thing is, other night, that stuff happened with those thugs. I don’t remember it. Harry told me about it. But none of it was an accident. Just take that note.”

“Trying to scare me, Tad?”

“Just make that note, like I told you.”

“Tad—”

“Shut up, Joey. What I got is a major drinking problem. I don’t happen to be gay. If I were, though, I want you to know that I would be the best goddamn dick sucker ever fumbled with a zipper. I tell you this to let you know when I decide to be good at something I am. I tell you this to let you know that I am very good at whipping people’s asses. I tell you this because I don’t think you’re any kind of friend to Harry. I think you’re a fucking little parasite that would suck the blood out of the withered balls of a dead hyena.”

“You don’t have to get nasty.”

“You opened the door, shit-dick. You wanted to know about me, and now that I’m in touch with my true feelings, let me stay in touch. I think you are one rotten piece of stringy, sun-whitened dog shit lying windswept on an ant-infested hill. And you want to make everything and everyone around you turn dead and white too. Can’t stand the fact Harry’s got something going and has a chance and could quit drinking. ’Cause where would that leave you? Folks that didn’t grow up with you, they wouldn’t give you fifteen minutes in an outdoor shithouse unless it was on fire and you tied to the toilet.

“You are the biggest goddamn loser since losers were invented, and you’re like a fucking disease. You spread your loser, withered-white-dog-turd sensibilities wherever you go, just hoping you’ll drag everyone else down into the sewer with you, you piss-and-turd-gulping piece of glorified dog shit that almost walks like a man. Now, I’ve got that off my chest. I got one more thing to say, a question really. Would you like your steak to go, you fucking odoriferous weasel ass?”

Joey started to open his mouth.

“Oh. One last thing. You speak loudly, cuss me, act nasty in any way, you will wake up with a fucking tube in your nose and one in your dick. You’ll think you’re a spaceman, so many tubes will be running out of your body. I will beat you and slam you and toss you and kick you and stomp you and just about anything I can think of, up to hitting you with some of these chairs, and possibly some of the patrons. So don’t. Don’t say anything. Not a goddamn word, even if it’s in Greek.”

Joey closed his menu, slid out of the booth, and walked briskly toward the door.

The waitress, Sandy, appeared.

“Hi,” Tad said. “Uh, there will just be two of us after all. Our friend remembered he left the stove on.”

In the bathroom Harry washed his hands carefully and looked around and felt nervous, but there were no sounds that had sounds beneath them, light and shadow, images and pain.

No. He was cool.

So far.

He dried his hands under the blower, took a deep breath, went back out into the restaurant.

When Harry came back to the booth, Tad was reading the menu. Harry said, “Where’s Joey?”

“He left.”

“On foot?”

“Sure looked that way.”

“Where to?”

“I’m not certain. Liquor store would be my guess.”

Harry picked up his menu, said, “He coming back?”

“I don’t think so…. I would say no.”

“You two get into it?”

“Heavens, no. We just talked.”

Later, back at home, in the dark, Harry took off his clothes and sat naked on the couch. He sat there for a long time. Slowly he got up and went to the trash can and took out the wine bottle and held it near the window so the outside light could shine through it. There wasn’t even a drop left. He set it on the bookshelf and looked at it for a while, then he put it in the trash can again.

He sat on the couch and looked at the trash can.

He sat that way for about five minutes, then got up and got the bottle out of the trash and held it against his nose and smelled it. It smelled like strawberries and a back rub. He ran his tongue just inside the bottle neck. He began to work his tongue savagely along the outside of the bottle. There was just the faintest taste of wine.

He noted he had an erection.

Holy shit. I’m so fucking horny for liquor, I’ve got a hard-on.

That old dog won’t hunt.

Harry broke the bottle in the bathroom sink and picked out the glass and put it in the bathroom trash. He cut himself in the process. He sucked his finger and looked at his face in the mirror. The light was off, so he could not see himself well. He could see enough to notice a man with his hand in his mouth, sucking. All of this over a goddamn wine bottle.

He washed his hands and his face and put on a fresh pair of shorts and got his pillow and blankets out of the closet and lay on the couch and covered up.

He thought about how the wine had looked in the jelly jar, and how Joey had acted as he drank it. How he had smacked his lips and how the wine had beaded on his lips, how he had licked at it when it splashed onto the sides of his mouth.

Harry got up and found the jelly jar Joey had drunk out of. There was just the faintest bit of wine in the bottom.

This is silly, Harry told himself. I want a drink, I can have a drink. Hell, one drink, that isn’t anything. Maybe I could go to the store, get a beer. Just one.

In
Rio Bravo
, the drunk in the movie had quit drinking the hard stuff, just had a beer now and then. That worked for him. He could drink a beer. It was the hard liquor he couldn’t have. A beer. That would be cool. Just one. A cold one.

Shit, Harry thought. Dean Martin was an actor. He didn’t have to get over being a drunk. He was playing drunk. In my case, Harry thought, I am not playing.

He washed out the jelly jar, in case he should start trying to drink the dregs, and went to bed. After a long while of thinking about drink and thinking about the sounds that made him drink, the faces he had seen, the pain he had felt, he drifted off to sleep.

29

So Harry, he’s doing his center-of-the-universe thing with Tad, and he’s got a lot of spare hours (drinking took up more time than he realized), and he’s spending the rest of the time going to school, studying, working, not drinking, not missing Joey, trying to find that damn center, and then, surprise, he finds the center of the universe. Easy. It’s right in front of him.

And its name is Talia.

She’s looking just two beats above movie starrish. Hot mama on a cool fall day. A dream a-loose in the world of mortals. All in white, and the light loves her. Her skirt is not that short, but looks short because her perfect legs are so long, and the white top is frilly, and her breasts, dark as if touched with cool shadow, are plenty full and plenty showing, and her face is alight with a smile, teeth so white and full an orthodontist would bow to them as if to a shrine.

It was then that Harry noticed the pack of folks with her.

Four boys, dressed to the nines, bodies by health club, clothes by designer wear, hair by stylists, combed perfect and not subject to the wind.

Harry wore faded jeans—and not fashionably faded—a loose shirt, and his hair was a twist and wisp that crawled all over his head. He was whiter than typing paper seen in a bright light. It got that way when you hid from the world.

There were a couple of nice-looking girls with Talia as well—one of them may have been with one of the boys, the other solo—but that left three guys to be with Talia. If the other girl only appeared to be solo, and was in fact with one of the other guys, that still left two.

Harry thought: Unless all the unfettered guys are gay, odds are bad for our hero.

And then Talia looked at one of the boys and smiled, and then, the universe be praised, she looked directly at him.

He felt a movement in his pants that wasn’t shifting pocket change.

“I didn’t mean to separate you from your friends,” Harry said, taking a sip of his coffee, watching her over the top of his cup.

“That’s all right,” Talia said. “I’ve wondered about you.”

“Me?”

“Sure. I’ve been looking for you.”

“You have?”

“Yes, I have…. This could be called our spot, couldn’t it?”

They were sitting and having coffee in the same place as before. “Yes,” Harry said, “I suppose it could. I’ve thought about you a lot too.”

Talia looked pouty. “If you have, where have you been?”

“Busy.”

“You haven’t been coming to class. I waited. I went by where you were supposed to be. I thought you dropped out.”

“I missed a couple classes. Been helping a friend.”

Talia smiled, and Harry thought: Wow. She left her pack to be with me. That’s pretty damn cool.

Now it was just him and her.

And, of course, everyone else in the place.

Still, it meant something, way she acted. She had to really like him, leaving her friends like that. She had looked back at the guys when she came over, before he asked her to coffee, and he wondered about that, her looking back, but, shit, you could read something into everything, and that was his problem.

Take it as it is, he told himself. Take it as it is.

He said, “You know, I don’t know if you like movies much, me, I’m a movie buff.”

“I love them.”

“But I was thinking, you know, this weekend we could catch a movie. Together.”

“Of course together.” She laughed. “We could even go at the same time.”

“Well, yeah. That was silly. Sure. Together. Could be there’s nothing good on, I haven’t checked, but we can see. Maybe what we can do is I can pick you up, or meet you on campus, and we can walk over to Dineros for something to eat, then go to the movie. Oh, and there’s this new steakhouse. Khan’s. It’s good. I ate there when it first opened. But Dineros is close, and that might be best.”

Shut the fuck up, he told himself. You’re babbling.

“That sounds good. I’m in. But I’ve got to go right now. Can we do it tomorrow afternoon? You can pick me up here.”

She took out a pen and paper, wrote down her number. She had already given it to him before, but he said nothing. He wouldn’t have minded having a collection of the number, as long as it was written with her hand.

“Call me before then. Okay? We can iron out times and when and where to meet.”

“Absolutely.”

He didn’t realize it until he had walked to his car and driven home, but he hadn’t bothered with his planned route, hadn’t even thought about it.

Just walked to his car and drove home in a stupor.

The world was spinning better, had to be. The sun was brighter and the air was sweeter. Every dog, even one with acute audio-choronological hearing, had his day.

Bark. Bark.

Harry went home and began taking the cardboard and egg cartons off the walls.

30

It was late afternoon and the sun had fallen earlier than the day before and the shadows were longer and the wind was cooler and full of smells. Tad and Harry, side by side, moved across the yard in the dim light and the windy swirl of leaves, and Harry could feel it now, the thing Tad had told him about.

A sensation of being one with it all.

And he could feel it even thinking about Talia.

It was different, thinking about her this time. It wasn’t distracting. It was part of his focus. Part of a whole. He was the world. The universe. He and Talia, all part and parcel.

Fact was, he felt as if he were king of it all.

One with nature and—

When he fell it hurt.

“Watch them roots,” Tad said. “Bunch of old roots over here near this end.”

31

Saturday, day of his date with Talia, he saw something in the paper that surprised and delighted and somehow disturbed him.

It was a photograph of Kayla.

She was no longer a kid. She was full-grown. Looked good. She was wearing a police uniform. A uniform for the town’s force. She was back.

She was in a photograph with a bunch of other cops, her eyes shining out from under her cap. Her hair was tied back. She had a big gun on her hip.

She was part of a recently graduated class. She was tops in her class, in fact. Said so in the article. Said, too, she had finished most of college while in high school. Some kind of smart-kid deal. Then she finished the cop training program.

Kayla had fulfilled her dream.

She had become a cop.

He thought of how it felt when he touched her that day so long ago, and how it had felt when she had leaned over and kissed him.

Branded him with her lips.

How she had smelled. So wonderful. Two pieces of a bigger puzzle. Missing hunks of the universal pattern.

Kids, he thought.

We were kids.

By now she had most certainly found love. May even have a kid. She was piecing someone else’s puzzle.

And there is another thing.

There’s Talia.

Lovely, Talia. Goddess on earth.

I have a date with her.

Woo-hoo.

32

It couldn’t have gone any better, that date. Talia, she looked ravishing in just blue jeans, a simple shirt, and sandals. Way her body filled those clothes, it was if she were liquid that had been poured into them and solidified. She was tall, dark, lean, but not skinny like so many women these days, and she was sensual in a kind of I-would-fuck-you-to-death-then-suck-the-marrow-from-your-bones kind of way.